In the years between my Catholic confirmation and Grace’s birth, my church attendance grew increasingly sporadic, but I never missed a Holy Thursday service. It was my favorite night of the liturgical year, and had been since that first Holy Thursday when I woke up with Chris in my apartment and a gold cross around my neck. That night I went down the block to St. Patrick’s in the rain, walked up the slick stone steps, pulled open a carved wooden door, and entered the brightly lit nave.
I didn’t know what to expect but took my seat and read the unfamiliar prayers, enjoying their novelty. Before the Mass was performed, before the long and—even to me—overly dramatic priestly procession of the Eucharist, I watched Father Dowling bend on one knee to wash the bare and bright feet of three nuns. The nuns, old and sweet-faced and a bit stooped, were dressed in full habits. In turn they leaned down to pull off their black shoes and black socks and lower their feet into the metal basin. When Father Dowling finished washing the last woman’s feet, she put her hand on his shoulder and he reached up to hold it.
That night, after the service, Chris had met me on the stairs of St. Patrick’s, her gym bag slung over her shoulder. I stopped on the stair above her, laughing as I bent down to kiss her cheek. She laughed too, but took me by the hand and led me down the stairs. “I don’t kiss girls who are taller than I am,” she said. We went to dinner then, at a dark café around the corner from the church, and I remember we sat next to an open window; I remember there was a small, square planter of grass on the table. I remember that I believed, for the entirety of that dinner, in the possibility of my impossible life.
In the years that followed I looked forward to Holy Thursday even when I was trying to keep my distance from everything else about the Church. Holy Thursday was irresistible. It was that row of nuns’ feet, that man kneeling with his basin of water. It was the Last Supper in all its drama: anxious disciples in an occupied city, a beloved and tired Jesus, that holy and human swirl of love and betrayal and good-bye. And then, the last hours of his body and his voice. What could be more thrilling?
But the year that Grace was born I forgot all about Holy Thursday until nearly midnight when I was standing at the bathroom counter decanting shampoo into travel-sized bottles, preparing for an early morning flight to Florida. My heart sank when I remembered the day. I could have washed Grace’s feet! How lovely that would have been, how sad to think I had missed a chance to make a simple offering, an acknowledgment. But an offering to whom? To God or to the self I was supposed to become? And what exactly did I want to acknowledge? That I still cared about the Last Supper? That I still felt Jesus near me, felt his quiet and loving companionship? I did not. And this is what I couldn’t admit then: I did not miss him. And this absence of desire—never mind his actual absence—made me feel like a failure.
So I had turned my face to another sun, which despite all the work and worry gave me extraordinary pleasure. And while I was not a perfect mother to Grace and these were far from perfect months, she was clearly the miracle I was getting right.
Grace and I were flying to Florida to see my nana, who was eighty-five years old when Grace was born. Nana had a stroke a few weeks before we were scheduled to arrive. It was a small stroke; she suffered no lasting impairments. My mother had heard she was recovering well, but when we got to Nana’s house she didn’t greet us at the door. She called out a tired hello to us from the living room, where she was resting in her recliner. My mother, who had flown in from Colorado and met me at the airport, looked at me. We both knew this was not a good sign. Perhaps the stroke was not so little after all. We leaned down to give Nana long hugs and kiss her soft skin, brown and freckled from twenty-five years in the Florida sun. She cried when we hugged her, which she had never done before.
Nana’s face had changed since I last saw her. At first I thought it was only the passage of time, but that wasn’t really it. It was more of an emptying. “It’s so good to see you, Nana!” I said, over and over. “So good to be here.” I wanted to put my head in her lap, wanted to feel her long fingers in my hair, the cool metal of her rings against my forehead and cheeks. But Grace was in her lap now, her head between Nana’s freckled hands.
After a few minutes Grace began to squirm, so I scooped her up and sat her on the floor in front of Nana’s chair. I gave her a pile of blocks to knock down and Nana clapped for her. We ate a small dinner together on the sunporch and I fed Grace a few teaspoons of pureed squash from a jar, then read her My First Book of Sushi. My mother and Nana finished eating, both of them laughing at how I knew the cardboard pages with their absurd rhymes by heart. I was glad for the chance to make Nana laugh.
Nana gave the three of us her bedroom so that there would be enough space for Grace’s Pack ’n Play. I was too embarrassed to tell her that while the extra floor space would be helpful, Grace wouldn’t be sleeping in the Pack ’n Play for more than an hour or two. It was Nana’s California king bed that we needed, to accommodate our three-generation co-sleeping. As I snapped Grace into her pajamas and curled up on the bed to nurse her to sleep, I remembered a time when I was seven years old and sitting on that very bed in my swimming suit (we were always in our swimming suits in Florida), while Nana showed my mother her new shoes. She pulled the boxes down from a shelf from which later—when I was grown and Nana wore only white Mary Jane sneakers with mesh toes—I would pull shoeboxes full of old birthday cards for us to read. But when I was seven the shoeboxes were too high for me to reach and Nana had no trouble getting them herself. When I was seven the shoeboxes were filled with spectator pumps and a pair of pale-yellow heels with a thin ankle strap. I loved those shoes and knew that someday such things would be mine. I had already shifted my gaze away from my mother with her long, brown hair, her flared jeans and cork sandals. I had already set my sights on Nana in her high heels and coral lipstick, gold chains clasped around her tan neck.
Several years before our Easter visit, when I was still living in Philadelphia and had just started dating Chris, I flew to Florida for the weekend. The trip was a last-minute one: on Tuesday I woke with a longing for Nana and early Thursday morning I boarded a plane. Nana was still driving then and she greeted me outside the baggage claim with open arms, her eyes shielded by enormous black sunglasses.
When we arrived at Nana’s house, she poured iced tea for both of us in cut crystal glasses and motioned me into the living room. “So then,” she said, “tell me something.”
I knew by this she meant tell me something true, tell me something real. Any topic was fine with Nana so long as it involved love, personal epiphany, or a childhood friend joining the priesthood. So I told her about St. Patrick’s, and how I had been going to Mass, that I had joined the confirmation class. I told her that I was happy but also nervous, worried that I would be asked to give up more than I want to. Nana converted to Catholicism before she married my grandfather, so I thought she might have some idea of what I was talking about. I didn’t tell her about Hector, or Chris.
“It’s about giving over,” she said, “that’s true.” She was smiling, her voice warm. “And there are things you have to give up, there is”—she paused here, picked up her reading glasses from the table next to her, and tapped them gently down again—“renunciation.” She smiled at me. “But it was what I wanted.” For Nana the Church was about other people: a husband and children, a family life ordered by shared practice and observance. I often thought of Nana in those first weeks and months of visiting St. Patrick’s when I watched women herd their children into the pews, women not much older than me, and I wondered if maybe I would also do that someday. But those were fantasies I was trying hard not to entertain. The whole point of St. Patrick’s was that it was mine and mine alone. The whole point was that I needed to do what I had never done, which was to sit still and surrender my fantasies and plans.
Later I would think about what Nana said, and the word she used: renunciation. I would realize that perhaps I was selling her short in thinking she didn’t have her own personal struggles with what God and the Church asked of her. I could only see then that the Church had not taken from her what I feared it would take from me.
Nana rocked herself up and out of her recliner. She clapped her hands. “Let’s go to the beach.”
We spent much of the next two days swimming together at the quiet beach near Nana’s house. In the late afternoons we rested on her sunporch, then went out for an early dinner in restaurants with views of shallow harbors, their docks lined with rows of clean, white boats. We went to the movies; we looked at old picture albums. We talked about the assisted living she visited a few months ago with my uncle when she was on a trip up north. “Hibernian Hall,” Nana said in a dramatic voice. “We were there for afternoon tea, which they served in Styrofoam cups.” She laughed. “I hate drinking tea in Styrofoam cups.” I swore to Nana that I would rescue her from Hibernian Hall, should she ever find herself there. “I’ll take you at your word,” she said, still laughing, and put her hand over mine. Then she told me a story. While visiting another of her sons during that same trip, she spent the afternoon with her daughter-in-law’s mother, a woman significantly older than Nana. “After lunch,” Nana said, “she told everyone that they could bring her home, she was ready to go, but I knew she wasn’t ready, not really. I knew she wanted to stay, but she didn’t want to be in the way.” Nana looked at me, more serious now. “When I say that, when I say you can take me home, don’t believe me.”
On Saturday afternoon we went to Mass. I sat close to Nana on the slippery wooden pew. I knelt and stood and sat with her; I waited in the pew when she joined the line for communion. She retreated from me during that hour. There were no whispered comments or explanations, no gestures other than a long embrace during the passing of the peace. We left the sanctuary in silence. She paused at the back door to dip her fingers in the stoup of holy water and cross herself, and for a moment I wondered if she would dip her fingers again and cross my forehead, the way she always had when I was young. But she kept walking out of the church and into the still air. “Well, that was lovely,” she said, putting on her sunglasses, and then, without waiting for me to comment, took my hand. “I feel like getting a new lipstick,” she said. “You?”
When Nana and I hugged good-bye at the airport the next morning I couldn’t keep myself from crying. We were standing at the terminal drop-off, the sun already bright on our faces. Nana let go of my shoulders and took my hands in both of hers. I felt the familiar smooth surface of her thick wedding band on my palm. I wanted to say something, to explain the crying, but Nana spoke first. “Rosebud,” she said (she had called me Rosebud all through my childhood, although she hardly ever did now that I was grown), “you go home and find the good parts. There are so many good parts. Leave the hard things here with me. I can take care of them for you.” She shrugged as if to say my burdens would be no trouble for her. “You can think of me here and how much I love you. You can remember that it doesn’t have to be so hard.” She squeezed my hands, then let them go to smooth my hair, to touch my cheeks.
I arrived home and called Chris at her office. She was an ambitious associate in a large law firm: she was at her office all the time, even on warm Sunday afternoons. As I waited for her to pick up the phone, I knew that I would ask her if she wanted to have dinner, and I knew she would say yes.
On Monday afternoon I was in Hector’s office, telling him what Nana had said. “She said it doesn’t have to be so hard,” I told Hector. This is what I didn’t say: there is a different way to do this. There is a way to want God and also want, in the same breath, affection and companionship. I didn’t say these things because if I did I would not be able to hide that I was in love. I didn’t say these things because I knew Hector would not, on principle, disagree, but would still tell me that right now it is not possible for me to have both. I didn’t say these things because I was not certain he was wrong.
“Maybe she means you don’t have to resist the process. You don’t have to continually engage in a battle of wills. You can surrender to a will that is not your own.”
I deflated. “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe she does.”
Four years after that visit I wrote to Nana to tell her I was getting married, and that I was marrying a woman. I told her that I hoped she would know I was still the same granddaughter I had always been. A few days after I sent the note, I came home to a message from Nana on the answering machine telling me, in a voice broken with emotion, that she was happy for me and loved me dearly, and that would never change. And two days later I received a letter in which she apologized for that emotion in her voice, and assured me that she was not sad but only worried that I thought marrying Chris would change the way she felt about me. “My love for you is everlasting,” she wrote.
The week before our wedding a box arrived addressed to me in Nana’s beautiful script. Inside was a set of six Limoges dessert plates that had belonged to Nana’s own grandmother. They were rimmed in gold foil and painted with winding pink rosebuds.
On Easter morning Nana decided she would rather eat dinner at home than at the restaurant where she made reservations weeks ago. “I’ll go to the store,” my mother said while we were getting dressed in Nana’s room. “Why don’t you stay home with Nana? Her Eucharistic minister is coming over in a few minutes.”
I knelt down on the floor next to Grace and restacked her jingling foam blocks. I didn’t look at my mother. “Oh, that’s okay,” I said. “I’m happy to help you with the shopping.” I couldn’t tell my mother that I hadn’t received the Eucharist since I was pregnant with Grace, and that it no longer felt possible. I wish I could have seen then that communion was impossible for hopeful reasons, that I couldn’t receive because it still meant so much to me. I had faith! It was a simple fact about me, like my thick hair and bad eyesight. The trouble was I had tried to grow my faith like an annual plant in the garden, tending its showy blooms that had no chance of making it through the winter when I should have been trying for something a little hardier. I should have been trying for roots.
I remembered a phone conversation Nana and I had many Easters ago. “I’m not having a good Easter,” I told her. “I don’t think it’s my holiday. I might not even celebrate it anymore.”
“Oh sure,” she said. “Why not?” (“Why not?” is something we liked to say to each other in what we called our Mary Tyler Moore Days, those years in my early twenties and her late seventies when we were both living alone, figuring out how to pay the bills and make baked potatoes in the toaster oven.) “You can choose your holidays,” she said. “But you know, if it’s really Easter, then it can’t be anything but good.”
But it can. Look at us now, Nana, I thought as my mother pulled out of the driveway with me next to her and Grace fussing in the back seat. You are waning and I am turning away. How exactly, I wanted to ask Nana, do I love both you and this baby? And how in the world do I also love God? I used to hope that having a baby would increase my capacity for compassion, my understanding of the mysteries of love. And Grace had done just that. The only problem was, she alone filled my new capacity. I might have had more to give, but I gave it all to her. I was a distant wife, a self-absorbed daughter, and an absent friend. And I could live with all that. Or I should say I did live with that, in the same way I lived with my dizzying and unwieldy love for Grace. But I was maxed out. I knew that I could not bear the fragile beauty of Nana and Jesus on the sunporch. Would I ever be able to stop crying?
As I write this I think of how lovely it would have been to stay home with Nana that Easter morning, although I have long since forgiven myself for choosing instead to push Grace around Publix in a shopping cart. In the years since that Easter morning I have often imagined that I made the other choice, and in my mind’s eye I can see myself sitting next to a weakened Nana; I can feel Grace on my lap. I can see myself crying and crying, but I can also see the moment when I stop. This imagining is a sort of prayer, really, and when I pray it I am reminded of something Andre Dubus wrote, about how he believed that prayer was not beholden to time, and so it was possible to pray for people and events of the past, and for those prayers to ease the way of those long gone. Dubus wrote that he sometimes still prayed for Jack Kennedy. I know my prayer is not the same, I know there is no moment on the sunporch to revisit and nothing can change that, but I still pray for both of us then. And I ask God to ease Nana’s loneliness, and my fear.
We went back to the house with a turkey breast and sweet potatoes for roasting, a bunch of thick asparagus stalks, and a box of butter cookies. My mother made dinner and we ate together on the sunporch. Everything was just how Nana liked it and she said so, which, I could see, pleased my mother. After dinner Nana took a nap in her recliner while my mother cleaned up and I entertained Grace.
The next morning we packed our things. “What should I do with this?” I asked my mother, pointing to the travel high chair we bought for Grace at Target. “Maybe I’ll put it in the Love Shack,” she said, using Nana’s moniker for the shed where she kept her washer and dryer and her three-wheel bicycle. I finished packing while my mother talked with Nana. Nana didn’t want her to leave. My mother promised that she would come back right away, as soon as she took care of a few things at home. And she would make good on that promise; she would return to Florida in two weeks, and four weeks later Nana would be living in a convent-turned-assisted-living in Pennsylvania, a few miles down the road from Hibernian Hall. I would not be called to rescue her; Nana would enjoy many good years in assisted living. But the other promise, the one about not believing her when she says she wants to go home, I broke that one. Because what Nana was really asking then was for me to conspire with her against the solitude of old age, against the expectation that she would want to fade politely into the background. But that Easter I began to let her fade.
We took the suitcases to the car. Nana sat in her recliner, her back to the door. I went in to say good-bye. I put Grace on Nana’s lap one more time and told her I loved her. She kissed Grace, cradled her small head. I took Grace to the car, and a few moments later my mother came out of the house. She got into the driver’s seat and backed the car out of the driveway. Just before we made the turn onto the street, Nana came to the door. She waved and blew us a kiss. “Oh, good for her,” my mother said. “Good for her for saying good-bye.” And Nana stood there at the door, waving, until we turned the corner and she disappeared from view.